ArtSlut

Tower Retells 1966 University of Texas Tower Shooting

If you’re from Texas, you more than likely know the tragic story of the University of Texas tower shooting, which took place on August 1, 1966.

During that late morning, former Marine sharpshooter Charles Whitman rode the elevator to the top of the tower on the Austin campus armed with an assortment of weapons and opened fire on the people below, killing 15, including an unborn child. In 2001, another man who was shot by Whitman succumbed to his injuries. While there have been countless articles and books written about the event (and even a 1975 made-for-TV movie, The Deadly Tower, starring Kurt Russell), the unique vision behind filmmaker Keith Maitland’s 2016 documentary Tower revisits the story in a way we’ve never seen before.

The film is a harrowing and exceptional retelling of that fateful day told through the use of first-person testimonies, archival footage and reenactments rendered with rotoscopic animation. “There are monsters that walk among us,” Maitland told Texas Public Radio in an interview last year. “Whether they’re created by society or whether they’re self-motivated to do harm, I really don’t know. But I do hope that the film sparks conversation that allows audiences and viewers to draw their own conclusions.”